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batsplat · 7 months ago

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hi batsplat! i would like to say that you are an absolute pillar of the motogp community on here, like you are truly so so appreciated. both for your knowledge and also for the way you write about things (i think you could write 3000 words on a grocery store trip valentino took in 2003 and still make it super interesting reading)

i was reading your post about your favourite rivalries that didnt include one of the aliens, who would you personally include as part of that list? (versus who is really good but not quite alien status) id also really like to know if (and who) youd count as aliens from the pre-motogp era, and if theres been a difference over time about how often we are seeing aliens or if theyre easier/harder to spot as technical developments have sped up

hope you have a great day!

that's so sweet... thank you that's such an incredible compliment dsdkhfkhfd

about the aliens, the way I use the term is entirely as a historical descriptor, not as a qualitative assessment of any riders. it's a useful shorthand for a specific riders in a specific era, but to me it has limited relevance outside of that era. so to be clear we're talking valentino, casey, dani, jorge and marc - and according to common wisdom this usage originated from colin edwards' 2009 comment:

“But as I’ve said before, I’ve got to be pleased to be finishing next best behind those four guys, or should I say aliens. “They are riding out of this world and to be right behind them means I’m doing the best job I can and that’s about as good as I can hope for at the moment.”

(jorge discusses valentino as an alien in 2007, see here. which might be complete coincidence, but has always made me kind of curious whether the word was floating around in the paddock in some capacity before edwards 'coined' the term)

the thing is, right, it made sense to treat those four (and later -casey +marc) as distinct from the field, because they were winning almost everything. one reason for this was that they were very good, very skilled riders. another was that from 2007-15, only four to six bikes were capable of regularly challenging for wins at any one time. it was a massive field disparity that quite frankly was partly enforced through machinery. that's why it makes sense to include marc in that term: it's not just the fact that he was very good, it's the fact that he was riding a repsol honda that was the best or second best bike by a long way for his first three years in the premier class. in 2016, motogp returned to michelins and introduced new technical regulations - and for all intents and purposes, the alien era ended. it ended when eight different riders won in eight races that season. yes, marc, valentino and jorge were still the top three in the championship... but it's the difference of whether you go into a weekend convinced you know the winner will come from a list of four riders, or if you very much do not know that. between 2008 to 2015, apart from the aliens, a grand total of two riders claimed wins - dovi on a repsol honda in 2009 and ben spies on a factory yamaha in 2011. both of those were wet races (which of course are generally more open than dry ones). so just to reiterate: a greater number of riders won in 2016 alone (9) than in 2008-15 combined (7). (in 2007, a further two different riders won races - capirossi on the championship-winning factory ducati and vermeulen on the suzuki.) yes, obviously the aliens were very good riders, nobody is going to argue with you over that... but those numbers? they're only possible in a specific version of motogp - one that only existed for a few years

honestly, I don't even really use the term 'alien' to describe valentino pre-2006 or marc post-2016. it's just not that useful to me... aliens to me is a 'pack hunter' thing, where even if some of them are injured or are having a bad day or whatever, at least one of them will basically always be there to pick up the pieces. marc and valentino might have dominated the sport as a whole - but not all of their championship seasons were completely dominant, and there's only so much any one athlete can dominate in the sport... you're not going into every single weekend thinking 'oh yeah they're definitely going to win' (yes, yes, there were two times per year where you did very much do that with marc). which is different when you compare it to the aliens as a pack, where you could be confident that ONE of them would end the weekend on the top step of the podium

which is why I just don't apply the alien term to anyone pre-valentino - it's not because I think they were less good or less talented or less anything, it's because for me it's a term that's more about an era than it is about individual riders. you have to treat each era on its own, and I'm not really a big fan of inter-era comparisons. it's just kind of impossible to say whether a rider in the 1970s is more talented than one in the 2020s, whether ago's numbers are more or less impressive than marc's and so on... the sport has just changed in so many ways over the years. of course, in sports you do generally have this upward momentum where each generation is 'better' than the last. sports has gotten more professionalised, there's been massive advances in terms of pedagogy and sports medicine and exercise science and all of those things - all of which already affects how athletes train from childhood onwards. the young aren't more 'talented' in the sense that they were born with an innate superior ability to compete at the sport, but they are more 'talented' in that their ultimate ceiling will be higher as a result of all these gradual changes over time. these things can change quite quickly even (and if other sports is anything to go by, I wouldn't be surprised if the nineties/early noughties brought some big changes in that regard) - so already between, for instance, valentino and marc there'd probably been a real shift in how young talent is being nurtured

(the most blunt illustration of this is that young valentino's lifestyle was completely different from that of young riders today, in terms of how much time he spent training in the gym, sleeping habits, nutrition etc etc. athletes now can't get away with that much deviation any more, and indeed valentino had to massively change his approach in the 2010s to remain competitive - but of course it's different if you haven't been doing this stuff since you were a kid. I think we can safely assume valentino's 2003 supermarket trips looked rather different from marc's 2017 ones)

being good in pro sports may in some ways be harder now than it was in, say, the eighties, and the level of competition you're facing might be higher now - but of course, it would also by extension be unfair to judge those athletes by the standards of today. also, different eras are going to lend themselves to different profiles of rider depending on competitive trends, type of machinery and so on - even very basic stuff like how tall you are might have helped you in a certain era and hindered you in another... so what does that mean for talent? if we're discussing 'talent' at all, how can we possibly treat it as anything other than relative to the era we're discussing? to me, it just makes these comparisons between different generations pretty pointless... or well, I like talking about some of this stuff in a more holistic 'isn't this interesting' kind of way, not a 'this is why xyz is better than xyz' approach... this kind of thing is also why I finds goat debate such a uniquely boring way to spend your time, incidentally

this is a very long way of saying, I don't have a metric by which I judge athletes pre-2000 as 'alien' or 'not alien'! I think you have similarly dominant athletes, though again it is so tough to decide how much of that is down to talent and how much of it is down to bike advantage. if you take doohan's title winning seasons for instance:

yeah, look, sure, you can call him an alien as far as I'm concerned - if I'm watching these races live I will be expecting doohan to win in any given weekend. I'm still kind of missing the pack hunter feel in some of these seasons, so I won't know for certain the winner is going to come from a very short list. like take 1998:

not really one group vs the field, is it? and yeah, even if I consider doohan an 'alien' in some of those seasons, I'm still not going to call him that - because the term was essentially coined in 2009 for a specific group of guys that one other guy was later added onto. the competitive landscape and demands of doohan's era were so different that it feels off to try and go back and label him or any other past riders aliens... they were phenomenally talented, yes, they were great champions, yes, they can be called as good as the aliens, sure - but why wrench the term out of its historical context? is it still an analytically useful concept if you do so, except as a way to generically refer to a rider as 'very talented'?

which is also why I personally don't describe anyone since then as an alien. this doesn't mean I don't think fabio or now pedro aren't as good as those guys were, I just don't think they've been given the opportunity to have that kind of hold over the sport. fabio won five out of eighteen races in 2021 - and he did so on a yamaha that basically only he was able to consistently get a high level of performance out of. which is deeply impressive - but unlike say casey in 2007, he didn't have those other riders to dominate all the other races. eight riders won a race that season! it's just a fundamentally different competitive landscape. personally, I'd be perfectly content if we don't get another alien era. of course 2007-15 isn't all bad, but for good reason most fans' most fondly remembered eras are either 2001-06 or 2017-19... yes, at times one rider was too dominant, but it still felt like more riders had a shot at victory - and most importantly the quality of the racing was generally very high. this kind of domination by a few mega talents on the best machinery can get drab pretty quickly (though of course a lot of the blame for decreased race quality needs to be assigned to the 800cc era 2007-11, not to any of the aliens themselves)

I'd be quite happy to retire the term alien going forwards... except as a useful shorthand for a specific group of guys who have mostly retired. it shouldn't be used as a way to bash the young stars, as if they just can't measure up to the legends of the past. which would be dumb! again, plenty of ways in which motogp is harder now than it ever has been, though the most important thing is that it's just... different. not better, not worse, just different. sure, maybe we'll get another equivalent to the alien era, even though I personally think it's quite unlikely. if it happens, yeah, let's discuss cranking the term out again (and, yes, if you look at the current season and ignore sprints... if this current trend continues then we can have the debate at the end of the season. pecco and jorge despite all their apparent inconsistencies are currently building a pretty solid case for themselves) (now I've said that they're both gonna crash out of assen huh)

that being said! I don't exactly neatly follow this principle myself, because sometimes I do use something like the term 'alien-like talent' to refer to fabio or pedro... obviously, you can argue this is basically the same as calling them aliens in everything but semantics. so what's the criteria there? when do I use this term? I think to me it's just... instant, 'in your face' talent. they arrive to the premier class and they shine basically immediately. valentino got a relatively sedate start to the premier class by alien standards - which is fitting, because he's not really about that blistering raw pace. still, he wasn't far from being a rookie champion, got ten podiums, two wins... not too bad. casey was on a satellite team, but he got pole in his second ever race and came painfully close to winning his third. dani got a podium on debut and fought for the championship for almost the entire season. jorge got pole in his first three races and won his third. marc won the second time out and of course secured the title in his rookie season. compare that to fabio - pole in his fourth ever race on satellite machinery, fighting for wins in his first season. pedro got a podium in his second ever race and is handily outperforming everyone else on that bike

so it's about how quickly these guys pick this stuff up, how quickly they make that step from one level to another - though again, it's important to stress you can't just neatly compare these achievements! valentino's first two seasons were on 500cc bikes, which were notorious for being kind of evil. some of these riders started on satellite bikes (we're not counting valentino here), and there's also plenty of talk about how the bikes have become more complicated to ride now, making pedro's rapid adjustment even more impressive. but in every case, there is just this ability to 'be fast immediately', whatever the circumstances... and it's worth pointing out that even though pecco had a mediocre rookie season, he was incredibly quick in 2019 pre-season testing. jorge martin secured his first pole position and podium at his second race in motogp

speaking of, those two were already a touch older when they joined the premier class. there does generally seem to be something to the idea that in motorcycle racing, if you are not already very fast at a certain age, you will have a quite definitive ceiling... and from valentino onwards, the age by which you need to already have reached that standard of 'very good' seems to have gone down. when we're talking about talent and throwing around the term alien, this feels like another important change to mention - doohan was not winning his titles as a 22 year old! neither was rainey! or schwantz! or lawson! or... actually spencer was very young, yeah. but I think you get the point. I cannot tell you definitively why this changed, but it clearly has changed. in the 21st century, only two riders have won titles when they were older than 26: valentino (29-30) and jorge (28). valentino and marc were both 27 when their dominance over the sport ended (even if valentino secured titles after that point and marc will very probably do so as well). casey was 27 when he retired. (fun fact: pecco bagnaia is currently 27 years old.) so overall it's pretty rare in grand prix motorcycle racing to operate at the top of the premier class for more than a certain number of years - but the precise age window in which you are likely to be at your best does seem to have shifted pretty radically this century. which should demonstrate how hard these things are to compare... like I said, talent is often assessed by how quickly you are good at something - but if we called mick doohan a late bloomer, it would be wildly ahistorical

and yeah, look, this idea of 'you have to be good young or you will have a certain ceiling' is hardly unique to motogp, lots of sports are like that... another measure of this precocity that's perhaps more useful than just 'age' is looking how long it took them to win a title from when they joined the premier class (if they did so at all, of course). it's generally very fast! marc year one, valentino, casey and joan year two, jorge and fabio year three... and, well, pecco and hayden year four. of course, there's exceptions to this 'be fast immediately' rule - athletes who ended up being very good and title contenders who had slightly different paths getting there. the sete's and dovi's of this world - and to a lesser extent hayden too, who unlike those two was only even really a title contender in a single season... but generally speaking, those riders seem more heavily reliant on circumstances playing out just right to have a shot at a title

or perhaps! perhaps it's going to change! especially if you look at repeat champions, pecco does become a bit of an outlier in how he got there this century, doesn't he? compare the numbers he was posting in his rookie season vs valentino, casey, jorge and marc. and in some ways, you can extend this even further and say he's a massive historical outlier in terms of any premier class champions. there was an article about this in late 2022:

and some more about how historically unusual he is:

isn't that great? you don't become premier class champion with that kind of a rookie season, but pecco did! hey, aleix was a serious title threat in that season, which is a far more remarkable story still! and the thing is, right, if you're studying the current era and are labelling some riders aliens but leaving out pecco... then no offence but what's the point? look, who knows, maybe marc and pedro and david alonso are going to dominate the next twenty titles and pecco will have been a weird blip. but isn't there something fun about believing that a bunch of different riders could eventually develop into title threats? wouldn't it be kind of cool if you don't have to just write someone off age 22 any more? I don't know, I think it's a neat development! I hope it sticks around! there'll be plenty of alien-level talents in the future, but personally I wouldn't mind at all if there were no more aliens

#hope you have a great day too anon and again that is an INCREDIBLY sweet comment #'aliens' is just my way of avoiding the term 'fantastic four'. but that's basically how I use it #obviously this is all my personal read bla bla... if you want to call fabio or schwantz or surtees an alien go ahead none of my business #it's not something i feel THAT strongly about. i do feel strongly about talent discourse though!!#i mean relative to other sports pecco's already pushing it for me... that moto2 title is a bit sus #in a different way fabio was FANTASTIC!! what a surprise! what a revelation! people had written that kid off and they were so wrong!#motogp #//#brr brr #batsplat responds #alien tag #i'm very jekyll and hyde about this in motogp because in sports in general i'm not into the wunderkids #but i just HAPPEN to like a few specific guys in motogp a lot who HAPPENED to dominate the championship for like two decades #that's not me!! i'm all about smarts over natural talent about getting gradually better rather than showing up fully formed #shaking my head while watching 2001/2007/2010/2013 to show everyone i don't agree with what's happening

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fictionadventurer · 7 months ago

Text

A Crazy Tale

By G.K. Chesterton (1897)

"Hey, diddle, diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon."

It is incredible, but true, that a young man sat opposite me in a restaurant and spoke as is hereafter set down.

He was a tall, spare man, carefully dressed in a formal frock-coat and silk hat. His tone was low and casual, his manner simple and very slow, and his bleak blue eyes never changed. Anyone just out of earshot of the words would have supposed that he was describing, in a rather leisurely way, an opera or a cycling tour. I alone heard the words; and ever since that day I have gone about ready for the Apocalypse, expecting the news of some incalculable revolution in human affairs. For I know that we have reached a new era in the history of our planet: the creation of a second Adam.

He spoke as follows, between the puffs of a cigar:

"I do not ask anyone to believe this story. Only in some wild hour of a windy night, when we could believe anything, when the craziest of a knot of old wives is wiser than all the schools of reason, when the blood is lawless and the brain dethroned, when we could see the windmills grind the wind, and the sea drag the moon, the apple-tree grow lemons, and the cow lay eggs, as in a wild half-holiday of nature; then, in the ear and coarsely, let this tale be told.

"When my story begins, I was walking in a still green place. The words sound strange and abrupt even in my own ears; but there is a reason for their abruptness.

"At that point the record of my life breaks off. The day, hour, or second before some stunning blow, some tremendous event befell me, and I awoke without a memory.

"Of the lost knowledge thus sealed within me I have a kind of half-witted fear. I move trembling in the close proximity of something huge, yet hidden in the darkness of my brain. Only of two things I am convinced. The first is, that this event, which I cannot recall, was the greatest of my life; that after all my adventures, wild as they were, were dwarfed in its unapproachable presence. The second comes of a certain hour, when suddenly, and for a second, the veil was lifted and I knew all. It had gone in a flash, but I am profoundly convinced that if I tell to another all the circumstances that led up to that instantaneous revelation, to him also, as he studies them, the words will suddenly give up their meaning, and their simplicity strike him with an awful laughter.

"This then, is the story.

"The greenness, that I walked like one in a dream, stretched away on all sides to the edges of the sky. Sleepily, I let my eyes fall and woke, with a stunning thrill, to clearness. I stood shrunken with the shock, clutching myself in the smallest compass.

"Every inch of the green place was a living thing, a spire or tongue, rooted in the ground for those fantastic armies. The silence deafened me with a sense of busy eating, working, and breeding. I thought of that multitudinous life, and my brain reeled.

"Treading fearfully amid the growing fingers of the earth, I raised my eyes, and at the next moment shut them, as at a blow. High in the empty air blazed and streamed a great fire, which burnt and blinded me every time I raised my eyes to it. I have lived many years under this meteor of a fixed Apocalypse, but I have never survived the feelings of that moment. Men eat and drink, buy and sell, marry, are given in marriage, and all the time there is something in the sky at which they cannot look. They must be very brave.

"Again, a little while after, as in one of the changes in a dream, I found myself looking at something standing in the fields, something which looked at first like a man, and then like two men, and then like two men joined, till, after dizzy turning and tramping round it like the searching of a maze, I found it was some great abortion of nature with two legs at each end, calmly cropping the grass under the staring sun. I have said that I ask no one to believe this story.

"So I travelled along a road of portents, like undeciphered parables. There was no twilight as in a dream; everything was clear cut in the sunlight, standing out in defiant plainness and infantile absurdity. All was in simple colours, like the landscape of a child's alphabet, but to a child who had not learnt the meaning.

"At one time, I seemed to come to the end of the earth; to a place where it fell into space. A little beyond, the land re-commenced, but between the two I looked down into the sky. As I bent over I saw another bending over under me, hanging head downwards in those fallen heavens, a little child with round eyes. It was some strange mercy of God assuredly that the child did not fall far into hopeless eternity."

The young man paused reflectively. I tried to say "a pool," but the words would not come. I seemed to have forgotten it. I seemed to have forgotten everything except his terrible blue eyes, big with unsupportable significance. Then I realised that he was speaking again. "I heard a great noise out of the sky, and I turned and saw a giant. Stories and legends there are of those who, in the morning of the world, strayed also into the borders of the land of giants. But it is impossible for any tongue to utter the overpowering sense of anarchy and portent felt in seeing so much of the landscape moving upon two legs, of looking up and seeing a face like my own, colossal, filling the heavens.

"He lifted me like a flying bird through space and set me upon his shoulder. I shall never forget the sight of his huge bare features growing larger as I came nearer to them; the sun shining on them as they smiled and smiled; a sight to give one dreams."

The young man paused again. I seemed to feel the whole sane universe of custom and experience slipping from me, and with an effort like a drowning man's I cried out desperately. "But it was a man--it was your father."

He raised his eyebrows, as at a coincidence. "So they said," he observed. "Do you know what it means?"

I found myself broken and breathless, as Job might have been, battered with the earthquake question of Omniscience.

He went on, smoking slowly.

"With the giant was a woman. When I saw her something stirred within me like the memory of a previous existence. And after I had lived some little while with them, I began to have an idea of what the truth must be. Instead of killing me, the giant and giantess fed and tended me like servants. I began to understand that in that lost epic of adventures which led up to the greatest event of my life, I must have done some great service for these good people. What it was, I had, by a quaint irony, myself forgotten. But I loved to see it shining with inscrutable affection in the woman's eyes like the secret of the stars. There are few things more beautiful than gratitude.

"One day, as I stood beside her knee, she spoke to me; but I was speechless. A new and dreadful fancy had me by the throat. The woman was smaller than before. The house was smaller: the ceiling was nearer. Heaven and earth, even to the remotest star, were closing in to crush me.

"The next moment I had realize the truth, fled from the house, and plunged into the thickets like a thing possessed. A disease of transformation too monstrous for nightmare had quickened within me. I was growing larger whether I would or no.

"I rolled in the gravel, revolving wild guesses as to whether I should grow to fill the sky, a giant with my head in heaven, bewildered among the golden plumage of Cherubim. This, as a matter of fact, I never did.

"It will always fill me with awe to think that no sign or premonition gave me warning of what I saw next. I merely raised my eyes--and saw it.

"Within a few feet of me was kneeling one of my own size, a little girl with big blue eyes and hair as black as crows.

"The landscape behind her was the same in every hedge and tree that I had left; yet I felt sure I had come into a new world.

"I had got to my feet and made her a kind of bow, looking a fantastic figure enough; but a red star came into her cheek.

" 'Why, you are quite nice,' she said.

"I looked at her enquiringly.

" 'They say you are the mad boy,' she said, 'who stares at everything. But I think I like them mad.'

"I said nothing. I only stood up straight, and thanked God for every turn of my rambling path through that elvish topsey-turveydom, which had led at length to this. Although I had not asked for a miracle in answer, two or three drops of clear water fell out of the open sky.

" 'There will be a storm,' cried the girl hastily.

"She seemed quite frightened of the dark that had come over the wood, and the shocks of sound that shook the sky now and again. This fear surprised me, for she had not seemed afraid of the grass.

"She seemed so broken with the noise and dark and driving rain that I put my arm round her. As I did so, something new came over me: a feeling less alien, and disturbed, more responsible and strangely strong; as if I had inherited a trust and privilege. For the first time I felt a kinship with the monstrous landscape; I knew that I had been sent to the right place.

" 'You are very brave,' she said, as the deafening skies seemed bowed about us and shouting in our ears; 'Do you not hear it?'

" 'I hear the daisies growing,' I said.

"Her answer was lost in the thunder.

"We were miles further on before she said, 'But are you not mad?'

"I spoke; but it seemed as if another spoke in my ear.

" 'I am the first that ever saw in the world. Prophets and sages there have been, out of whose great hearts came schools and churches. But I am the first that ever saw a dandelion as it is.'

"Wind and dark rain swept round, swathing in a cloud the place of that awful proclamation."

The young man paused once more. Some one near me moved his chair against mine. I remember with what a start I realised that I was in a crowded room; not in a desert with an insane hermit.

"But you have not told me," I said, "of the great moment: when you seemed to have discovered all."

"It is soon told," he said. "Ten years afterwards the girl and I stood in one room together: we were man and wife. Other men and women went in and out, all of my own stature. There were no more giants; it was as though I had dreamed of them. I seemed to have come back among my own people.

"Just then my wife, who was bending over a kind of couch, lifted a coverlet, and I saw that for which, haply, I have been sent to this fantastic borderland of things.

"It was a little human creature hardly bigger than a bird. And when I saw it, I--knew everything. I knew what was the greatest event of my life: the event I had forgotten."

I said "Being born" in a low voice.

I did not dare to look at his face.

The next consciousness I had was that he had risen to his feet, and was putting on his gloves very carefully.

I sprang erect also and spoke quickly.

"What does it mean? Are you a man? What thing are you? Are you a savage, or a spirit, or a child? You wear the dress and speak the language of a cultivated pupil of this over-cultivated time: yet you see everything as if you saw it for the first time. What does it mean?"

After a silence he spoke in his quiet way.

"Have you ever said some simple word over and over till it became unmeaning, a scrap of an unknown tongue, till you seem to be opening and shutting your mouth with a cry like an animal's? So it is with the great world in which we live: it begins familiar: it ends unfamiliar. When first men began to think and talk and theorise and work the world over and over with phrases and associations, then it was involved and fated, as a psychological necessity, that some day a creature should be produced, corresponding to the twentieth pronunciation of the word, a new animal with eyes to see and ears to hear; with an intellect capable of performing a new function never before conceived truly; thanking God for his creation. I tell you religion is in its infancy; dervish and anchorite, Crusader and Ironside, were not fanatical enough, or frantic enough, in their adoration. A new type has arrived. You have seen it."

He moved towards the door. Then I noticed he had come to a stand-still again, and was gazing at the floor apparently in deep thought.

"I have never understood them," he said. "Those two creatures I see everywhere, stumping along the ground, first one and then the other. I have never been content with the current explanation that they were my feet."

And he passed out, still carefully buttoning his gloves.

I went back to the table and sat down. About four minutes after he was gone I felt a kind of mental shock, like something resuming its place in my brain.

It occurred to me that the man was mad. I am almost ashamed to admit with what suddenness it came. For so long as I was in his presence, I had believed him and his whole attitude to be sane, normal, complete, and that it was the rest, the whole human race, that were half-witted, since the making of the world.

#g.k. chesterton #collected in 'daylight and nightmare'#an '80s collection of obscure fantastical chesterton tales #the intro calls this one of the stories of his awakening process after his juvenile depression #'a sort of willed optimism which expressed itself in a new-found delight in the world'#and i will note that the one story so far that i don't like is the only one written before this #i also want to note: he wrote this at 23 #all post-college-age writers behold and despair #he also wrote it the year after he met frances #which makes the middle part even more sweet #and the fact that they never had children makes the moment of revelation here kind of sad actually

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